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Of all invertebrates, the octopus is considered the most intelligent, and sadly, rather underrated. They’ve been caught on video wrestling sharks to death like sea-dwelling honey badgers, using tools and opening twist-cap bottles. And according to at least one paleontologist, their ancestors may have been bigger, smarter, scarier and perhaps even a bit artistic.
The Triassic World
During the Triassic Period, a creature we call Ichthyosaur swam the seas, chowing down on whatever it wanted–it was the size of a school bus and had a mouthful of jagged teeth, and until Monday, paleontologists assumed it sat at the top of its watery food chain. But a stash of nine interestingly arranged, fossilized icthyosaur bodies discovered in Nevada have long confounded researchers, who haven’t been able to determine how they died. Formerly, it was believed the seas were shallow in that location and the giant proto-whales fell victim to an algae bloom. But evidence from the surrounding rocks indicate the seas were still deep at the time of their demise, leaving science with something of a mystery.
That’s where Mount Holyoke College paleontologist Mark McMenamin comes in. “Charles Camp puzzled over these fossils in the 1950s,” said McMenamin. “In his papers he keeps referring to how peculiar this site is. We agree, it is peculiar.” See, the bones of these ichthyosaurs are etched differently from one another, indicating that they didn’t die at the same time. But since they’re all buried together, something interesting had to have happened. And McMenamin thinks that “something” is the work of kraken.
Deliberate Burial
McMenamin believes that the midden-building and predation behaviors observed in modern octopuses–specifically that of the famous Shark vs. Octopus video, wherein an unassuming dog shark gets totally pwned by a seemingly mild-mannered cephalopod–support the theory that gargantuan prehistoric kraken were terrorizing the ichthyosaur population, “either drowning them or breaking their necks.” Suspiciously twisted necks and many broken ribs from the ichthyosaur dig seem to support the idea, as fantastical as it is. But weirdest of all is how the bones came to be buried together, and why their arrangement seems bizarre: “I think that these things were captured by the kraken and taken to the midden and the cephalopod would take them apart,” and rearrange them into what McMenamin believes is “the earliest known self portrait.”
In the fossil bed, some of the shonisaur vertebral disks are arranged in curious linear patterns with almost geometric regularity, McMenamin explained.The proposed Triassic kraken, which could have been the most intelligent invertebrate ever, arranged the vertebral discs in double line patterns, with individual pieces nesting in a fitted fashion as if they were part of a puzzle.
To illustrate, the bones are arranged like this:
That’s not even a little bit creepy.
Or is it Pareidolia?
Soft-bodied animals, by virtue of definition, have nothing to leave in the fossil layer, so McMenamin’s tentacled beast will likely never turn up even if it did exist. And this presents something of a problem for the theory, since many researchers are “highly skeptical” of his “evidence.” Roger Hanlon, a marine biologist at the Marine Biological laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, says,”There’s nothing in the scientific literature that suggests that modern-day cephalopods do anything like this.” And according to Dr. Hans-Dieter Sues, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, the Nevada site “essentially represents a mass burial ground for ichthyosaurs in a shallow sea.” Speaking to Christian Science Monitor, Dr. Thomas Holtz Jr. of the University of Maryland declares that McMenamin’s approach to understanding the ichthyosaur peculiarities “is too many steps away from the evidence to call it science.”
But that doesn’t mean that McMenamin is universally scorned: science writers and kraken enthusiasts are rooting for McMenamin and his Triassic tentacled leviathan. Rebecca Boyle of PopSci is sympathetic, hypothesizing that “the hypothetical kraken was just lonely, and, unable to clone itself [as some modern jellyfish can], it made an artistic rendering of an imaginary friend? It seems possible, although maybe less possible [than] the imagined kraken.” But if moral support is what McMenamin needs, Cyriaque Lamar at io9 has got it in spades: ”[T]he possibility of finding that which is essentially a gargantuan mollusk’s macaroni illustration? That’s the kind of glorious crazy you hope is reality.”
What do you think, guys? Is McMenamin’s idea a little too crack-pot to hold water, or is there maybe something to this whole self-expressive kraken thing?
Sources:
The earth saw a mysterious episode of global warming 56 million years ago due to a surge of carbon into the atmosphere. Animals could walk from continent to continent and never see ice. That period is called PETM, or the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, and it changed everything about life on earth. Paleontologist Philip Gingerich has been studying the fossil record of the era for forty years, mainly in the Bighorn Basin, just east of Yellowstone National Park.
During the PETM itself a strange thing happened to some mammals: They got dwarfish. Horses in the Bighorn shrank to the size of Siamese cats; as the carbon ebbed from the atmosphere, they grew larger again. It’s not clear whether it was the heat or the CO2 itself that shrank them. But the lesson, says Gingerich, is that animals can evolve fast in a changing environment. When he first drove into the Bighorn four decades ago, it was precisely to learn where horses and primates came from. He now thinks that they and artiodactyls came from the PETM—that those three orders of modern mammals acquired their distinctive characteristics right then, in a burst of evolution driven by the burst of carbon into the atmosphere.
Learn more about the changes that happened during the PETM in the October issue of National Geographic magazine. Link
(Image credit: Ira Block)
I don’t know about you guys, but I am fascinated by the etymology of both words and nursery rhymes. But whenever I hear a new story about the origin of a nursery rhyme or tongue twister, I rush to find out more information because while they’re so interesting, many of these stories simply aren’t true.
That’s why I was so excited to share these two cool true stories of tongue twister origins with you, along with a quick explanation of why a few common etymology stories you’ve probably heard already aren’t actually true.
We all know that Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, but who the heck is Peter and why should we care if he’s got pickled or fresh peppers? As it turns out, this story is far more interesting than the simple tongue twister we’re all familiar with.
First off, it’s important to know a little history about the spice trade. You see, a long, long time ago, all spices were referred to by the generic name of “peppers.” They were also incredibly expensive and the companies who ran the spice trade would go out of their way to keep the supply low by rubbing the seeds with lime before selling them so they couldn’t germinate if planted. The practice was called “pickling.”
As for Peter Piper, he was actually a French pirate and horticulturalist named “Pierre Poivre” (which has become Anglicized into Peter Piper). Pierre was known for raiding spice stores so he could grow them in his garden in Seychelles and hopefully make spices more affordable and accessible for the average European. The rhyme comes from the fact that there were at least a few occasions where Peter Piper picked pickled peppers that wouldn’t grow in his garden.
Personally, I never thought much about the girl who sold seashells by the seashore. But as it turns out, the woman who was made famous in this terribly difficult tongue twister is actually quite the scientist.
Mary Anning enjoyed collecting seashells and fossils ever since her dad taught her how to dig up fossils when she was a little girl. The duo then sold their specimens to beach tourists and she became so famous in this role that Terry Sullivan eventually even wrote the famous tongue twister about her.
Then, in 1811, Anning’s brother noticed a skull sticking out of a cliff near her home. Mary was fascinated by the skull and started digging it out the ground, soon finding a massive skeleton of what she believed was a crocodile. As it turned out though, the giant croc was actually a dinosaur that later was named Ichthyosaurus. As this occurred at a time when most people still didn’t believe in dinosaurs, it was kind of a big deal.
Mary was proud of her discovery and went on discovering more and more dino skeletons, including fossils for a Plesiosaurus, a Pterodactyl and a Squaloraja. These days, many people credit Mary Anning with founding modern day paleontology –and you thought she was just a seashell dealer.
Of course, not all nursery rhyme origins stories are to be believed. Here are a few very untrue, but widely-believed stories about nursery rhyme origins:
more …
One way mammals are different from most animals is their large brains, in relation to the rest of the body. A new study says that the larger brains were developed for the sense of smell. CT scans of 190-million-year-old mammal fossils indicate that much of the the brain growth was in the area dedicated to the sense of smell.
“We studied the outside features of these fossils for years,” said Tim Rowe, professor in the Jackson School of Geosciences and director of the Vertebrate Paleontology Laboratory at The University of Texas at Austin, and lead author of the new study. “But until now, studying the brains meant destroying the fossils. With CT technology, we can have our cake and eat it, too.”
According to the study, other factors leading to larger brains in early mammals included greater tactile sensitivity and enhanced motor coordination. Fossils of some of the earliest mammals, such as Hadrocodium, bore full coats of fur, explaining the need for enhanced tactile sensitivity.
Researchers scanned a dozen early mammal fossil and more than 200 current species over ten years for this study. Link -via Geeks Are Sexy
(Image credit: Matt Colbert)
If you haven’t studied dinosaurs since you were an elementary school student, you have some catching up to do! As paleontologists find more and different fossils, our body of knowledge about the prehistoric reptiles has changed. Take the Stegosaurus, for example. What we thought we knew just a few years ago is different from what we think we now know.
Fossil footprints and detailed studies of its anatomy have proven that Stegosaurus didn’t drag its tail on the mud, but actually walked erect, like an elephant, with its tail held horizontally, parallel to the ground. Its back wasn’t as arched as they had us believe, and the neck was not carried horizontally as usually depicted, but upright, like a bird’s.
Also, the tail spike cluster (known among paleontologists as the “thagomizer”) didn’t actually point upwards, but sideways. This made the tail a much deadlier and more efficient weapon; to stab an attacking predator, Stegosaurus only had to swing its tail horizontally; punctures matching the Stegosaurus’ tail spikes have been found in the bones of predatory dinosaurs from the same age and place, proving once and for all that Stegosaurus wasn’t any less dangerous than the ankylosaurs that would evolve later.
And that’s just the first of ten dinosaurs we once thought we knew. Link -via the Presurfer
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Hundred of millions of years ago, sea creatures crawled up on land and started to become mammals. Then much later, a few went back into the sea, but left few fossils to show us how they did it -or at least that’s what we used to think.
For more than a century, our knowledge of the whale fossil record was so sparse that no one could be certain what the ancestors of whales looked like. Now the tide has turned. In the space of just three decades, a flood of new fossils has filled in the gaps in our knowledge to turn the origin of whales into one of the best-documented examples of large-scale evolutionary change in the fossil record. These ancestral creatures were stranger than anyone ever expected. There was no straight-line march of terrestrial mammals leading up to fully aquatic whales, but an evolutionary riot of amphibious cetaceans that walked and swam along rivers, estuaries and the coasts of prehistoric Asia. As strange as modern whales are, their fossil predecessors were even stranger.
These fossils raise almost as many questions as they answer. Read more at Smithsonian magazine. Link
Ischigualasto, meaning “the place where you put the moon” is a remote valley in Argentina. It is studded with geological formations left by wind erosion, amazing standing stones and boulders that are so rounded they look like enormous marbles. The valley’s once-fertile ground is now arid and contains so many plant and animal fossils that paleontologists come from all over the world to study them. Link
(Image credit: Flickr user Aylwin Lo)
Austin Houldsworth is an “interactive artist”. He wanted to see if it was possible to speed up the fossilization process from a few million years to a few months, and built a machine that he thought might do the job. Pictured above is Houldsworth with the body of a partridge that he subjected to four months of petrification. His ultimate goal is to try it on a person:
Yes, fossilising a human being is still the ultimate aim. Regarding this experiment, the results are promising enough to continue perfecting the machine… but I never saw the machine as the final result – it has helped me to understand the many different aspects which are required for the process to occur. And subsequently I’ve designed a number of improvements for the machine. I believe I’ll be working on this particular project for a very long time.
Link via Gizmodo | Artist’s Website | Photo: We Make Money Not Art
Belgian scientist Olivier Lambert has discovered a new species of whale, a prehistoric sperm whale that was a real killer. Leviathan melvillei was the size of modern sperm whales, with a very big difference:
Today’s sperm whale has no functional teeth in its upper jaw and only small ones in its lower jaw (which are mostly used in fights). It feeds through suction, relying on a rush of water to carry its prey into its open mouth. But Leviathan’s mouth was full of huge teeth, the largest of which were a foot long and around 4 inches wide. This was no suction feeder! Leviathan clearly grabbed its prey with a powerful bite, inflicting deep wounds and tearing off flesh as killer whales do, but with a skull three times bigger.
Leviathan was at the very top of the food chain and it must have needed a lot of food. While modern sperm whales mainly eat squid, Lambert thinks that Leviathan used its fearsome teeth to kill its own kind – the giant baleen whales. At the same point in prehistory, baleen whales started becoming much bigger and they were certainly the most common large animals in the area that Leviathan lived in. Lambert thinks that the giant predator evolved to take advantage of this rich source of energy. He says, “We think that medium-size baleen whales, rich in fat, would have been very convenient prey for Leviathan.”
This whale swam off the coast of Peru 12 million years ago. There’s lots more about Leviathan melvillei at Not Exactly Rocket Science. Link
Artist Chase Black has unearthed fossils — from the future! His series “Creatures from the Mechazoic Era” consists of sculptures of fossilized robots and cyborg animals. Pictured above is the long-extinct felis catus. You can view a gallery of his creations at the link.
Link via Geekologie | Image: Chase Black
A strange assortment of prehistoric crocodilyform fossils have been found in Africa. Crocodilyforms are ancient cousins of today’s alligators, crocodiles, and caimans.
For instance, the rodent-like RatCroc had buckteeth for rooting through the ground after tubers or simple animals.
The flat-bodied PancakeCroc was the “ultimate sit-and-wait predator,” Sereno said. The animal would lie motionless and “wait for something stupid” to swim into its rail-thin, 3-foot-long (0.9-meter-long) jaws, which were lined with rows of spiky teeth.
DuckCroc had a long, smooth, sensitive nose to poke through vegetation as well as hook-shaped teeth to snag frogs and small fish in shallow water.
And the plant-eating DogCroc had lanky legs that meant it was likely spry enough to run into the water if threatened.
By far the mightiest of the lot, BoarCroc was a 20-foot-long (6.1-meter-long) “saber-toothed cat in armor” that ate dinosaurs for dinner.
DuckCroc and DogCroc were previously known to scientists, and the rest are new discoveries by a team headed by Paul Sereno, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago. The expedition found fossils of all five in Niger and Morocco. Link (with video) -via Digg
(image credit: Mike Hettwer/National Geographic)
Photo: Christie’s
If you have $60K burning a hole in your pocket, you may want to mark your calendar: Christie’s is auctioning this stunning 100-million-year-old iridescent ammonite fossils excavated from the Bearpaw Formation, in southern Alberta, Canada:
[Pierre Pare, president of Calgary-based Korite International Ltd, Canada's main producer of ammonite fossils] says demand for the fossils — formed from the remains of a primitive mollusk that died out at the end of the dinosaur age 65 million years ago — is also being driven globally by practitioners of the Chinese esthetics system feng shui, who covet the Alberta ammonite’s bright colours and spiral shape.
While ammonites can be found in many countries, the conditions creating the dazzling hues of the Canadian fossils "existed only in one place in the world — right here in southern Alberta," says Mr. Pare.
These modern fossils are hand-made in Austin by artist Christopher Locke. Each one represents a different piece of "modern" technology that has already become extinct.
The artist has also collaborated with the local Goodwill computer and electronics recycling program, insuring that there is zero e-waste from this project.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by HeartlessMachine.
47 million years ago, whales that looked like this gave birth on land, according to a study published this week that analyzes the fossil of a pregnant whale found in the Pakistani desert. This type of ancient proto-whale was amphibious.
When the fossil was discovered, the scientists were perplexed by the jumble of adult and fetal-size bones. First they found small teeth, then ribs going the wrong way. The head-first postion of the fetus gave them the clue: land mamals are generally born head first, and marine mammals are born tail first.
Illustration courtesy John Klausmeyer and Bonnie Miljour/University of Michigan Museums of Natural History.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Marilyn Terrell.
The biggest snake ever discovered was announced today on National Geographic News. Its fossilized remains turned up in a coal mine in northeastern Colombia.
The monster measured 42 feet long, weighed about 2,500 lbs., and slithered through the rainforests 60 million years ago devouring crocodiles.
According to paleontologist Hans-Dieter Sues, associate director for research and collections at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC: "Given the sheer size, the sheer cross section of that snake, it would be probably like one of those devices they use to crush old cars in a junkyard."
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Marilyn Terrell.
